Choosing International Domain Names

This guest post was written by David Leonhardt.

So you’ve decided to market to an international audience. What to do about all those languages. What to do about all those nationalities? Should you stuff them all on a .com domain? Or should you set up a country-specific domain for each language and/or country and/or currency?

The answer is even less simple than the question. As a multilingual SEO services expert, I can help you make that decision. How you approach a multi-national, multilingual market will depend on a number of factors:

- Languages in which you can serve your customers
- Countries to which you can ship
- Countries you wish to target (even if you can ship everywhere, some countries might naturally be more – inclined to purchase your product or services)
- Currencies you accept
- How well you are set up to manage multiple websites.

This article will address strictly the aspects related to country domains, such as .ca for Canada or .fr for France.

Consider Latin America, where .com typically means “international”. There is a certain trust level that comes from dealing with a big international company and .com confers that trust. A local company could be a hole-in-the-wall outfit and sometimes people are shy to trust their money to them over the Internet. On the other hand, a local domain gives a local presence, if that is the image you are trying to project.

Next consider Europe, where .com is very often seen as “American”. Europeans often see Americans as brash and chasing a quick buck . As such, .com often makes people feel uneasy about trusting a website, whereas a local domain feels more trustworthy.

Consider Canada, which views .com much as Americans do – as the default for a website. Canadians don’t really distinguish between .ca and .com most of the time, since so many local websites are .com, and they are just as likely to type in .com even when they hear or read .ca.

There are unquestionably competitive advantages in the search engines from using a country-specific domain. I have often had Canadian client websites rank much higher at Google.ca than at Google.com, just because the domain is Canadian. I have seen this also with .fr and .co.uk websites. This is important, because Google serves up the local version of Google to anyone it identifies as being located there. So at my desk, Google defaults to Google.ca except when I search through the Google Toolbar. For this reason, I have an SEO Ottawa website specifically for the domestic market.

There is another advantage to country-specific domains – you can address people with their own currency. This can be important even when language is not a barrier. I have noticed that Canadians like to see their real costs without having to do calculations. This is even more pronounced among the British, and I assume it is also among Australians.

But too many domains are hard to manage, so sometimes it is much easier to put everything on a single .com corporate website. As I said at the beginning of this article, the answer is not simple.

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